VEGITALY VEGETATION DATABASE: A VALUABLE SOURCE FOR ITALIAN VEGETATION SCIENTISTS

In 2010, the national vegetation database VegItaly, a collaborative project developed by a large group of scientists and supported by the Italian scientific community, was presented at the 46th Conference of the Italian Society for Vegetation Science (SISV) held in Pavia (Italy) [1,2]. Soon the database has been acknowledged in Europe and become a founding partner of the rising European Vegetation Archive (EVA) [3], the first Italian member of the Global Index of Vegetation-Plot Database (www.givd.info/ID/EU-IT-001) and one of the main Southern European reference points for the creation of the European taxonomic standard list for vegetation studies named EuroSL [4]. The number of vegetation plots stored in this repository increased exponentially in the first years. After 2 years, the database already amassed 31,100 vegetation plots [5,6]. The large majority of these plots derived from published sources, representing at the time the largest Italian vegetation database. VegItaly was the first Italian database proposed as a standard to collect and manage vegetation data at the national scale. It currently hosts 37,452 vegetation plots but is not any more the largest Italian vegetation database, outnumbered by the "Vegetation Plot Database - Sapienza University of Rome" and followed by the more recent "AMS-VegBank - Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna". However, VegItaly is still standing as the only vegetation data repository in Italy held and managed by a scientific society. More than 10 years later, the Italian Society for Vegetation Science (SISV) along with the recently-nominated Steering Committee wants to relaunch its use by means of some technical novelties that have been introduced in the meantime. In this contribute, we provide an overview of the current material archived in the database, some basic statistics, data distribution in space and time, and representation of vegetation types.